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Jefferson Turner, left, who plays Harry Potter, and Daniel Clarkson, who plays all the other characters from the Potter novels, in Potted Potter.

By Karen FrickerTheatre Critic

Tues., Jan. 17, 2017

Eleven years ago, two young English actors landed a one-off gig: to entertain the crowds standing outside a London bookstore overnight waiting for the release of the sixth Harry Potter book.

They delivered a five-minute comic speed-through of the highlights of the existing Potter series. It went so well that they expanded the material into an hour-long show and took it to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

“And the rest is history,” says Daniel Clarkson, who plays all the other characters, while Jefferson Turner plays the bespectacled hero.

The show, Potted Potter, has since incorporated all seven Potter books and grown to a length of 70 minutes. Producer James Seabright has toured it to London’s West End, where it’s been nominated for an Olivier Award; across the U.S. and Canada, and as far abroad as South Africa, Dubai, the Philippines — and a few cruise ships.

The show made its North American premiere in Toronto in 2012, and Clarkson and Turner have such positive memories of the city and its audiences that they’re returning this week for the final performances in its current run at the Panasonic Theatre, taking over from actors James Percy, Joseph Maudsley, Scott Hoatson and Brendan Murphy.

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What do they think of the entertainment juggernaut they’ve created?

“We can’t believe it in the slightest,” says Clarkson, “and each step along the way we believe it less. When we got to go to Edinburgh, that was great. A U.K. tour? Amazing. Then we went to the West End and had that lovely moment when you see yourself on a tube (subway) poster. And when we got this lovely offer to play in Toronto” — thanks to Starvox Entertainment’s Corey Ross, who’d seen the show in London — “we were like, we can’t believe this.”

GTA spectators were a revelation, Turner says, because they “don’t have the same reservations as British ones. We said, ‘Oh, this is what audiences are meant to be like!’”

Potted Potter is billed as a parody, but Turner assures that it comes from a place of “loving homage. This is what Britons do if we love something: we make fun of it. Potter fans love the show because they can tell we love the books.”

The title — “potted” is U.K. slang for something that’s hastily and superficially summed up — is another way the British sensibility of slagging off and self-deprecation comes through in the show.

Last year, with much fanfare and to glowing reviews, J.K. Rowling advanced the Potter story with a new play called Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the first official Harry Potter story to be told onstage. Though Rowling is aware of it, Potted Potter is unauthorized and operates outside her empire of books, films and now stage works.

Do Clarkson and Turner think Cursed Child is stealing their theatrical thunder? On the contrary. Seeing it was “amazing,” says Clarkson. “It’s one of the greatest theatrical experiences I’ve ever had.”

“We’re coming from a different place,” says Turner. “We didn’t go, ‘Aww, that’s our show.’ Ours is very much looking at the books and going over what we already know, while the new play looks forward to the future of the story and the characters.”

Following on the success of Potter, Clarkson and Turner have created three other “potted” shows: Potted Pirates (about all kinds of pirate lore, not just of the Caribbean), Potted Sherlock (“All 60 Holmes stories, we set ourselves a little challenge there”) and Potted Panto, a parody of the traditional English Christmas pantomime, which they just finished playing in the West End.

Now that they’re 38 and 36 respectively (“old enough to know better,” one of them quips), are Clarkson and Turner getting tired of all this potting?

“We keep enjoying it as long as people are still enjoying it,” says Clarkson, “and now we’re seeing a whole new group of audience members coming who don’t know the material as well as our generation does”; a “Netflix generation” who perhaps receive the show in the same spirit as binge-watching.

No end in sight then for Potted Potter. Not bad for “two guys with a dressing-up box and a love of the books.”

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